medieval historian, archaeologist and writer

Category: Seasons

When I was a small boy – probably I was eight years old – my grand-father produced for my birthday a board game. This was no ordinary board game, however; this was Heroquest. Opening the box was like opening a portal into another world, like lifting the lid of the Box of Delights. One of the most powerful and evocative smells I know, a smell familiar to anyone who has bought an expensive boxed game over the last twenty-five years, is the unique aroma of plastic and freshly cut card that I first experienced on entering that case of wonders.

For those who are unfortunate enough to have missed this foundational monument of modern western culture, Heroquest was a game produced jointly by Milton Bradley and Games Workshop. It is what, in the ugly jargon of the console age, would now be called a dungeon-crawler. And, like many who encountered it at roughly the same age, it profoundly and permanently altered the chemistry of my brain. To be fair, I was already precociously steeped in fantasy. My first literary memories (of books without pictures) are of my mother reading The Hobbit to me at the age of 5, and the first books I read alone were the Chronicles of Narnia. Around the same time, my father revealed to me the complete radio series of The Lord of the Rings which he had kept secreted in some arcane vault since recording it when first broadcast on Radio 4 in 1981 (these tapes – which still survive – were complete with the original synopses, cut from The Radio Times and inserted into the cassette boxes).

This, of course, was fundamental and I was soon at home amongst dwarves and orcs and adventures undertaken in caverns deep beneath the mountains. It inspired a love of landscape, myth and fantasy which has endured to the present. What was different about Heroquest was that it opened doors that hitherto had been closed – it was sensory, tactile, inhabitable. It hinted at expansive worlds beyond the confines of the game, worlds populated by tangible sculptural representations of their myriad denizens. It affected me so profoundly at the time that I can still remember seeing the faces of weird creatures in the dark spaces between the trees. The night became alive with ideas that existed just beyond the limits of the real world and to me they seemed at the point of breaking through.

Sadly, modern fantasy has lost a great deal of its charm thanks to mass market commodification through online computer games, the rise of Games Worskhop as an aggressive share-holder owned business, and mega-budget Hollywood franchises. Back then, fantasy was weird and underground, unregulated and uncodified: spontaneous, creative and free. It is ironic that the success of Heroquest was partly responsible for that mass-marketisation of fantasy and the demise of the independent model shop. I often mourn those dark caves of mystery, their cabinets crammed with dusty miniatures whose obscure forms and inexplicable origins spoke to unfettered recesses of the imagination.

For many people, the love of archaeology was sparked by Indiana Jones or Time Team. For me and, I suspect, a surprising number of others, it was fantasy that first offered me my first glimpse of the inside of a hoary tomb, a ruined city, a forgotten mine shaft leading into the deep places of the world, a rusted blade, a mouldy manuscript.

Whether the mines of Moria or the Bastion of Chaos, these were the paths that led me down into the dark.

On one of the first days of October I went walking with my wife. I found my first conker of the year, with the beautiful patina and texture of newborn wood. It’s already wrinkled, like a hard shiny prune. After the walk I went shopping and bought a small collection of objects. I hadn’t intended them to be a collection, but when I looked at them together I was struck how my emotional response to the season was reflected in the things I had chosen. The warm, rich, smoked flavours of Beavertown’s Smog Rocket is full of the scent of bonfires and leaf litter.

Of course, mushrooms are a seasonal crop, so a mushroom themed notebook is perfectly appropriate for this time of year.

Autumn has always felt magical, partly because my birthday falls in October, but also because of other festivals – All Hallows’ and Guy Fawkes’ – and, especially, the build up to Christmas. Magical worlds feel closer, almost tangible, and the sights and smells of the season open seductive little windows to fantasy and fairy tale. Toadstools are very much a part of the mental furniture of fairy story. Sarah Maitland described this quality of fungi beautifully in her book Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of our Forests and Fairytales:

“[fungi is a] phenomenon of the forests […] which can give me the same strange shiver of fear as the dream of wolves and as the fairy stories themselves, a sense of being in the presence of something eerie.” (p. 211)

“When you come upon fungi in the woods they have a magical otherworldly appearance, enhanced by the improbable variety of forms and colours: fungi like jelly, like coral, like brains, like tongues flickering out of alder cones, and even, with the weird earthstars (Geastraceae), like aliens from space.” (p.212)

The word toadstool is particularly pregnant with images of the fairy realm, as are many of the extraordinary folkloric names of fungi, names that have welled up from porous seams of folklore buried deep below: Wood Hedgehog, Velvet Brittlegill, Dead Man’s Finger…

Ted Hughes has made an impact on my life in many ways. I read his poetry as a child, and the story The Iron Man had a profound effect on me when I was young. I was so enthralled by it that I made my own audio book version, sitting alone in my bedroom for hours, reading it out into the microphone of a cheap tape recorder. Why on earth I should have done such a thing is lost in time – perhaps by sounding it out I felt I could inhabit the story more profoundly than by simply reading it. The poems contained in Remains of Elmetare altogether of a darker hue, filled, like Autumn, with images of beauty, sadness and decay:

A wind from the end of the sky

Buffs and curries the grizzly bear-dark pelt

Of long skylines

Browsing in innocence

Through their lasting purple aeons

(Heather, 8-12)

The first edition of this volume of poems was conceived as a collaboration with the photographer Fay Godwin: her beautiful black and white images made a subtle counterpoint to Hughes’ dark and sometimes difficult text, sometimes softening, sometimes alleviating the bleakness of the words.

Shorn of those images the poems, though they lose none of their power and artistry, feel harsher and more alienating at times than they should. A reprint of the collection as it was originally conceived would be most welcome.